Julia Bardsley – interview for Staging Decadence

Plague in White Growth Gown: Garments of Disease from the Apocalypse Collection. Aftermaths: a tear in the meat of vision. SPILL Festival, London 2009. Photo by Simon Annand.

Julia Bardsley is a theatre maker working at the intersection of multiple artforms, including live performance, film, garment design, sculpture, and photography. Between 1985 and 1989 she worked with Phelim McDermott as a co-founder of derek derek Productions, before taking up positions as Joint Artistic Director of the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester between 1991 and 1993, and of the Young Vic Theatre in London, between 1993 and 1994. Disenchanted by the institutional limitations of theatre production she abandoned her directorial career in favour of a more hybridised practice as an auteur – although theatre and theatricality still rest at the heart of her practice. She is best-known for The Divine Trilogy, comprised of Trans-Acts (2003-08), Almost the Same (feral rehearsals for violent acts of culture) (2008-09), and Aftermaths: A Tear in the Meat of Vision (2009), the last of which being made in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which shaped that piece as well as much of her work since, including a series of performed ‘Reading Rooms’. One of these was dedicated to Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), which was in part a response to that crisis, while another, An Apian Paradox (2019), looked at Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee (1901) – a playwright and essayist closely associated with fin-de-siècle symbolism, as well as decadence. Bardsley’s practice also pulls female sexuality and desire front and centre, most explicitly across a series of projects gathered under the title Medea: darkmatterevents. She reflects on many of these performances and themes in this interview for Staging Decadence, dwelling on the costuming of the abject, the occult and that which is occulted, relationships between culture and depravity, and ‘baroque minimalism’.

Given its hybridity, what frames or terms of reference do you find most useful in describing your work?

I’ve never been interested in making hard and fast distinctions between forms or genres. I’m totally promiscuous. I like to play with whatever is available and with what seems appropriate to the concerns of the project at hand. It’s the thematics that I’m exploring that dictate what form the project might take. Sometimes that might be pure performance, it might mean it needs to be durational, it might include photographs and video. Often it includes an installation-style prologue, displaying the thinking and objects I made in the creation of the piece. More recently I’ve been working on projects being ongoing, that are located in the place of process, that are  never definitive or finished. The idea of a cohesive or coherent completion doesn’t really work for me anymore.

I wonder what that means in terms of the different elements that go into your performances. On the one hand you have, for instance, these intricately crafted garments that are hyper-refined and ‘finished’ – and films, to a certain extent – and on the other you have this more process-oriented approach that you’re describing. How do you see that balance?

For Medea: darkmatterevents, I was working through the persona of Medea, which wasn’t anything to do with the myth really. For me, it became a receptacle for exploring ideas around female sexuality and the physics of the erotic. The artist, Julia, channelled through the persona of Medea,  was in her studio/laboratory constructing  a model of a female orgasm, surrounded by an excess of materials – those things that you’re talking about – that have nonetheless been carefully curated materially and tonally: red, gold, grey, latex, fur, velvet, rubber, electrical components, magnets, laser lights, wires, stainless steel and glass. That’s the very specific lexicon, or palette of the project. In most of my projects a fetishization of materials, garments and objects is at play -  an obsession with detail, the display of abundance and, in the catwalk of Aftermaths, an exhibitionist excess. I have always been fascinated by the spectrum of ‘the real’ and ‘the artificial’, exploring the kind of transgressive affects that might occur when those elements are brought into proximity with each other. I enjoy the frisson and confusion. The balance that you mention between the highly designed and the process-oriented approach is one of combative coexistence, where you can have visible both the mechanisms and manifestations of production existing simultaneously in the same frame.

Medea in her laboratory from the Medea_darkmatterevents series: Medea_DARK|ROOM, SPILL Festival of Performance, London 2013. Photo by Andrew Poppy.

Could you tell us a bit about The Divine Trilogy: how it came about, what your ambitions were, and what came out the other side?

In 2001 I got a NESTA Fellowship, which meant that I could spend three years just making my own work. I was in a transitional period. I’d ‘retired’ as a theatre director and was questioning who I was as an artist. I knew I was a theatre artist of sorts but what kind? One of the artists working in the theatre that I admired was Tadeusz Kantor. He made these extraordinary performance pieces with ensembles, and he was also a visual artist. There didn’t seem to be a problem with being both those things. I’m a theatre creature, brought up in the theatre, but I found the conventional theatre frame stifling and reductive. So, the first piece I made was called Trans-Acts, which was in three parts looking at transgression, transformation and transcendence. The substructural frame was Biblical: the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. In that project I started thinking about myself, the artist, in the guise of three necessary transgressors: as Dunce, Fool, and Devil. For Act One, Transgression, I made pinhole photographs of The Dunce, a video piece called Foolish Suicide Attempts (2006) exploring The Fool, and a box containing photographs for The Devil. The second act was Transformation, where the artist, Julia Bardsley, transformed into the persona of The Director – a mute figure that was part animal /part human, part male / part female – transformed into the role of The Actress, and into the figure of The Understudy. So you have these sets of trios in operation. The project used these figures as a way of exploring, questioning and testing who I was as an artist and the place of theatre as part of my practice. I was contesting the approximation of theatre – that wobbly-ness– which wasn’t something I was interested in. I wanted the garments and objects to withstand close-up scrutiny. I wanted to create something cinematic and high-res, that could exist in a gallery with detail and care in the construction, where everything in the frame of performance earned its place. Trans-Acts was the start of understanding the conceptual, formal, aesthetic and material concerns of my creative work, one that embraced hybridity of form and the idiosyncratic.

From Trans-Acts: Act One - Transgression -The Devil (2003). 1of 9, 35mm photographs in archive box. By Julia Bardsley

Around 2007 issues of terrorism were at the forefront of our consciousness and a very specific culture of fear was being generated, so I started developing the second part of the Divine Trilogy, Almost the Same (feral rehearsals for violent acts of culture). The project looked at violence, terror, fear, and the beast. I was very taken with René Girard’s writing on scapegoat mechanisms, mimetic desire, violence, and the sacred. Performance and theatre is a classic scapegoat configuration – the adored star, elevated and deemed special by the mob or herd, being willed to both encompass all their desires and at the same time, fail and take the fall for all their shortcomings. In this piece I also wanted to look at myself as animal – or us as animals – and how culture renders us dead, in a sense, because we’re so over-cultured, so socially tamed, that we are removed from our corporeal selves, unable to experience physiological sensation. I was appealing to and wanting to explore something about being animal, and being dirty, being wild, and howling. In the project I move through the spectrum from feral to domesticated, to being totally sterile and over-cultured. I also thought the piece was going to be about patriarchal violence, but it ended up being about matriarchal violence and the violences of the female body. The biblical substructure for this piece used the Noah story – the animals going two by two into the ark – and the Nativity, in this case Mary giving birth to twin hares.

We recently interviewed David Weir for another aspect of the Staging Decadence project, and he referenced this quote of Théophile Gautier’s where he says that depravity is not found in animals; it is only human.

I would totally concur with that! There’s a fantastic [Rainer Maria] Rilke poem where he talks about animals never looking back or forwards, but always living in the moment., without that temporal consciousness or knowledge of their own mortality. I envy that state. I’m not anti-intellectual but sometimes it feels necessary to try and acknowledge something of our animal self, to bypass the limitations of the cerebral, of our specifically human intelligence. It’s problematic that we don’t have access to that. My sense is that we struggle with our socialised selves, which leads to pulls between internal desire and external expectations. That socialising puts a lot of pressure on us, not allowing us to access, I don’t know, the howling place, the dirty place.

Sanitisation?

Yes… Taboos. The terrible harms religion has done to people. Prohibitions. What that’s done to our psychologies, our sense of possibility, of creativity.

Poster image for Almost The Same (feral rehearsals for violent acts of culture). Photo by Manual Vason.

So is that what’s drawn you to the occult? Some occult practices and rituals sometimes incorporate actions that are far from being ‘sanitised’.

What would you characterise the occult as?

That which is hidden.

If you see the occult as ‘that which is hidden’, then yes, I am very drawn to that. I’m fascinated by Hermeticism: Robert Fludd and Giodorno Bruno, Artificial Memory Theatres, Masonic symbolism, imagery and rituals – particularly the idea of the Murder of the Principal Architect. I think there is an aspect of ‘revealing what is hidden’ in the garments that I construct, which are external manifestations of psychological states or a ‘wearing’ of the thematics of the project. The garments are like a skin, and I’m often disrupting, piercing, or cutting into that skin to reveal the meat beneath. I am very much influenced by the Vesalius anatomical engravings, where the flayed skin is tastefully draped to reveal the muscles beneath, while in the background, people are picnicking in a pastoral setting, or the anatomical waxworks at the La Specola museum in Florence (to which I made a pilgrimage many years ago), where a reclining woman, hair arranged peacefully across a satin pillow, has her intestines delicately splayed out of the open wound of her stomach, arranged in a similar fashion to her hair. I am also interested in the medical dissecting theatre and notions of autopsy, whose original meaning connects with that idea of revealing what is hidden: ‘the act of seeing for oneself’. Divination and augury are other connected areas that I’ve been thinking about, including prophecy and reading signs in the entrails of animals.

This is making me think of Aftermaths: A Tear in the Meat of Vision, which seems to me to be about how things are occulted, or hidden, specifically how financial markets seem to be predicated on hiding and mystifying trades of various kinds. So there’s a less appealing aspect of that which is ‘occulted’ going on there, but in your work it’s responded to in ways that are much more explorative in their engagement with the occult.

Yes, what motivated that piece had to do with what was happening in the financial world at the time, the mess that is capitalism, and the profound effects of that system, its relentless and hidden violence. Mark Fisher is so articulate in his explanation of the appropriation, absorption and pacifying nature of the capitalist machine in relation to that which challenges it. So I was thinking about a third part of the trilogy, and the Book of Revelations seemed appropriate in exploring the banking crisis and offering a critique of capitalism. I created the persona MC Prophet / Profit, who was at once Lucifer, a salesman, a cowboy, a funfair or freakshow barker: a figure who revels in disaster and everything that comes out of the energy of catastrophe. I’d been reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism in conjunction with research on End time, and the Rapture. So, it was really about playing with ideas of exploitation, excess and catastrophe. One of the things that I wanted to do, which didn’t come off, was try to capture something of the energy of an ecstatic club or dance gig – like going to see Underworld (I’m a big Underworld fan) – when your body’s sweaty and you’re transported… Generating and capturing that sense of abandon. I didn’t get to that in the end. It was just too controlled.

Plague in Gold Restraint Gown: Garment of Disease from the Apocalypse Collection. Designed by Julia Bardsley for. Aftermaths: a tear in the meat of vision. SPILL Festival, London 2009. Photo by Simon Annand.

There were many aspects of that performance that speak to decadence, for me at least. Decadence in the nineteenth century reacted to modernity and industrialisation, but in the territory you’re addressing – the finance industry – the work is more of a response to postindustrial capitalism. That does something to how decadence operates, I think. Also, in aesthetic terms, I was particularly struck by the amount of time and care that goes into the crafting of ‘garments of dis-ease’ that are worn by performers embodying a range of plagues, which are incredibly abject, but at the same time captivating, glittering, fascinating… But what we’re looking at as fascinated audiences is, in one case, a besequinned maternal figure with a pipe coming out of their mouth directly into their own womb, feeding off their unborn child. So there is a turning toward something very material, embodied, and corporeal, but also something artificial, and hyper-refined in its abjectness. That stands in contrast, perhaps – and what I’m about to say is a reductive caricature that I don’t fully agree with, but it has traction in the field – with the tendency in earlier manifestations of decadence to strive to access more ethereal, immaterial or abstract zones of the imagination. I’m going on a bit here, but does any of this resonate with you at all – this consideration of your work, specifically your scenographic choices and use of costume in performance, as ‘decadent’?

I don’t think of it in those terms, but I am following through on a number of threads and seeing how they manifest. That diabolical aspect, and the transgressive marriage of materials, is something that I’ve always been really interested in – but also an externalisation of internal states. In my work the garments are really crucial. I call them ‘psychological garments’ because they become external manifestations either of internal psychological states – of personas – or manifestations of the thematics of a project. So the ideas and conceptual dimensions of the project are worn somehow, and manifest in the garment: how it’s fitted, what kind of lining it has, the ways things are joined together, the various openings. In Trans-Acts The Director had a garment which was a gridded green suit, where she could unzip a sleeve that would open up – and it was red velvet inside – so it was gorgeous, but it was a wound, and inside the constructed, artificial wound were nestling three miniature figures from the piece. And I often have these codpieces that open up with furry tails coming out, or a bone protruding from the elbow or the heel. I am very interested in the gorgeousness and seductiveness of materials and objects, and at the same time the repulsion of what they actually are. So in one of the plague garments you have these pustules, these growths pushing through, spilling out, tumbling, abundant, and tumour-ed. It’s disgusting and revolting, but gorgeous and sumptuous at the same time. I like that combination, and what it does to both the image – when it’s having this push and pull between different components, where you have this excess where nothing is contained and is always on the point of collapse – and then the spectator’s relationship to it all, which is one of attraction and repulsion. Those extremities are what for me the work is all about: something physiological rather than just cerebral, even if the basis of how it’s been thought through is deeply conceptual. The affect works on something physiological that we can’t articulate but can nonetheless sense and feel.

From Almost The Same (feral rehearsals for violent acts of culture) Sacred Festival, London 2008. Photo by Simon Annand.

I love how your approach to costume undermines some of the assumptions we might have about the abject. When I think of the abject I tend to think of things and substances that are wet, slippery or slimy, but here we’re met with velvet, damask, or whatever it might be. And it’s that filtering of the abject through a beautiful, crafted and delightfully tactile material that would otherwise seem alien to the abject, and that’s sometimes used in the adorning of bodies to help hide the more wet and fleshy aspects of the abject.

Yes, I’m not interested in representation, but processes of translation. So in thinking about Medea: darkmatterevents, for instance, that was looking at the physics of the erotic and the electromagnet processes of creativity and female sexuality. For the garment I made for Medea, the breasts came out of holes in the grey dress that had gold rings around them and there were red electrical tape crosses on the nipples. There was the possibility, with metal clips, to connect the ‘nipples’ or the breast rings to other objects, or other bodies or to create circuits to the erotic ‘batteries’ that were a sculptural part of the vocabulary of the darkmatter world. The arrival of these types of elements comes out of working through the developing logics of the world of the piece and the thematics of the project – finding ways in which to manifest those things in a garment, or an object, or through the configuration of space. I should add that I design the garments, but I don’t always construct all of them. I made the one for Medea, but for Aftermaths I commissioned Sonja Harms and Stevie Stewart to construct the plague garments and Annabel O’Docherty to make the MC Prophet / Profit outfit, as I wanted really high-end tailoring. There are some cultural references in there as well, with the plague pregnancy garment in Aftermaths, which you mentioned earlier, being an homage to Leigh Bowery. But the thinking through, the constructions, is always a process of translation. With MC Prophet / Profit – with his gold teeth, cowboy hat, little pads on the back of his jacket like cut-off wings, Lucifer’s wings, this codpiece from which he pulled out a divining plumb bob, a heel with a bone horn coming out – the conceptual and thematic concerns are being translated through and manifest within this hybrid garment.

I wonder if we might talk about the Reading Rooms. Perhaps the one you made with Dominic Johnson, where Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism was read cover to cover while you were performing around the reading, or the one based around Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee – a figure primarily associated with symbolism, but several scholars have also folded his work into the study of decadence. Could you tell us a bit about these Reading Rooms, and perhaps especially what drew you to Maeterlinck?

I was thinking about the idea of reading a book cover to cover [in a performance] a long time ago, with the duration and structuring principle being the amount of time to read it from start to finish. The three books that were chosen for the Reading Room series weren’t fiction. As well as the Fisher and Maeterlinck, I worked with Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958), which has always been really important to me. Basically this was a selfish thing, of me wanting it to be read out loud, with me making things in the orbit of the book. Initially The Poetics of Space was going to be the first Reading Room, but then I read Mark Fisher. I didn’t know his work until after he died, and I was on a train reading Capitalist Realism and just thought, okay, I have to make a Reading Room out of this! It’s really urgent, it really needs to happen at a university [it was performed at Queen Mary, University of London] because of how he talks about education in realtion to capitalism, and then I asked Dominic if he would act as the live reader, with me being the live actioneer. It was quite an ask because he would be reading for 4-hours straight. He was great. He was very sartorial, read beautifully and looked brilliant in the space.

From Reading Room_02: Bardsley vs Bachelard: The Poetics of Space. Peopling The Palace(s) Festival, QMUL 2017. Photo by Julia Bardsley.

So that happened like a rogue project in the series, and then the following week was The Poetics of Space, which was ten hours – two five-hour days. The actor, Boyd Clack, who I’d worked with before, read it live. For this project I was focusing on the two buildings on my land in rural Portugal: the barn, a house of animals, and the house as a space of domesticity and culture. In the barn my partner Andrew [the composer Andrew Poppy] and I have our studios. He has his piano, which is this object of high culture, in the place where there had been cows and goats shitting and living and breathing and dying. I made scale models of the two buildings, and they became the two main elements that were used in this Reading Room. I invited Moa Johansson in to work with the ‘Nests’ chapter. She was a student of mine and was just about to graduate, and her graduation piece was this amazing durational work which explored ideas of location, home and of nests. And then Andrew worked with the chapter ‘Intimate Immensity’, which focuses on the notion of ‘vastness.’ He was adding a sonic dimension with pre-recorded playback and live bass guitar, and it became a co-existence between us three. It operated like an ongoing studio space, a space of reverie, with the materials and making becoming another kind of ‘writing’ over the 10-hours of reading, all the while exploring this interesting dialogue between nature and culture, the animal and the human, domestic and wild space.

From Reading Room_03: social insect trilogy part i. The Life of the Bee. Bardsley vs Maeterlinck: An APIAN PARADOX Fierce! Festival, Birmingham 2019. Photo by Manual Vason.

The third Reading Room, An Apian Paradox, which used Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee, fell into a different register, more wayward, with a wilfully bacchanalian, and dare I say, decadent quality. I set up a sticky/licky, female-beeing hive space and invited Moa to be a bee-ing with me in the hang-out hive for the 5-hour duration. We had record decks for BJ-ing using our finger-styluses and created prepared vinyl with bee materials. My brother Grant was the reader for this one, although this time the text was pre-recorded, not live. There’s this great chapter called ‘The Massacre of the Males’, which the female bee-ings just totally loved! So when that chapter is being read, they just sat down, supped prosecco, vaped and laughed a lot! I wanted to reclaim space for a female ecology that was just about pleasure; total pleasure, laughing, getting sticky, doing a bit of foraging, hanging out and spinning some discs.

Often in these interviews we finish on a question exploring what’s on the horizon, but in this case I want to ask you about endings… And the apocalypse! Your work can sometimes seem quite apocalyptic, but for me it’s about more than that. The end of the end, maybe; the ending or undoing of a particularly insidious worldview, for instance.

Yes, I kind of hoped that everything would collapse, with capitalism reaching its real breaking point [with the 2008 financial crash]; but we’re still feeling the effects of that, it’s all still limping along. The idea of ‘undoing’ is appealing – it plays into that notion somehow that I mentioned, of the work having an ongoing-ness, staying in the place of process, in a place of ambivalence perhaps. In the end I think of myself as a baroque minimalist, and an optimistic pessimist.

What’s a baroque minimalist?

A lot of the work that I really like, in the visual arts, poetry and music, is very paired down. It’s very reduced, and I envy the focus of those practices. I feel like I’d like to be that sophisticated artist who makes that sort of distilled work, but whenever I make a project, they just become these complex gluts and excesses of stuff, encrusted and overflowing. So I think my true nature is baroque, but my desire is minimalist. I’m wrestling with that: with who you think you want to be, and the kind of artist you are.

And an optimistic pessimist?

Well, I think I can be incredibly bleak about where we find ourselves, especially since Trump and Brexit. My optimistic side has been tested. I can feel overwhelmed by our destructiveness, our arrogance and hollow selfishness– that insidious human exceptionalism that seems to be so prevalent. But on the other hand, I can look at and experience creative endeavour, and it gives me energy, in a positive way, because people are still quietly getting on with their own thing, doing no harm, trying to be in the world. And there are those writers who allow for real complexity to happen – like Donna Haraway’s idea of ‘staying with the trouble’. It’s a fantastic notion. You don’t just reject everything that you find problematic or abhorrent, put it aside and ignore it; you actually sit in it, and work with the entanglements and difficulties. Not necessarily to change or effect things, but as a kind of acknowledgement of what is and where we are. Living a creative life, making work and existing as an artist is a political act, and it feels right to hold on to that and those values in these troubled and troubling times. Even if it‘s just having a conversation with somebody, being galvanised by a gentle exchange of thinkings. And, of course, laughing about the ridiculousness of it all.